Naidu to sit on fast to­day over spe­cial sta­tus for Andhra

NEWDELHI: Andhra Pradesh chief min­is­ter N Chan­drababu Naidu will sit on a day-long fast with his min­is­te­rial col­leagues and party law­mak­ers in New Delhi on Mon­day to protest against al­leged “in­jus­tice” done to his state by deny­ing spe­cial cat­e­gory sta­tus, of­fi­cials in his of­fice said.

“Im­por­tant lead­ers of other op­po­si­tion par­ties will visit Naidu dur­ing this pe­riod to ex­tend sup­port,” an of­fi­cial in the chief min­is­ter’s of­fice said. Naidu will lead a del­e­ga­tion of his party’s lead­ers to Pres­i­dent Ram Nath Kovind on Tues­day.

Naidu’s show of strength in Delhi comes a day af­ter Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi trav­elled to Andhra Pradesh and launched a scathing at­tack on the Tel­ugu De­sam Party (TDP) leader. Naidu has never won suc­ces­sive elec­tions and feared los­ing power this time, Modi said at a pub­lic event in Gun­tur.

Naidu walked out of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Na­tional Demo­cratic Al­liance (NDA) in March last year, af­ter the Cen­tre re­fused to ac­cept its de­mand for a spe­cial cat­e­gory state sta­tus for Andhra Pradesh and com­pen­sate for the losses suf­fered with the cre­ation of a sep­a­rate Te­lan­gana state in 2014.

Since then, Naidu has led an ef­fort to bring op­po­si­tion par­ties to­gether to forge anti-bjp al­liances in dif­fer­ent states.